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Physics Goes To Hollywood
pigreco314 writes "What do films like Independence Day, Armageddon and X-Men have in common? The answer is that apart from costing millions of dollars to make, they all feature in a new course called Physics in Films that is being taught to students at the University of Central Florida, according to PhysicsWeb. Costas Efthimiou, the mathematical physicist who teaches the course, believes that non-science students learn more about the fundamentals of physics by studying films and science fiction than they do from more traditional approaches." Among the topics discussed is "the conservation of momentum in Tango and Cash."
mind this studies :)
Trolling using another account since 2005.
I thought your post was very interesting.
I say WHATEVER WORKS. People (not just kids) don't always learn what is taught by traditional means. I know --i-- didn't. Seeing something visually or in new ways can sometimes more easily or quickly create understanding.
One of my best professors used to say that history is only there to help us understand movies.
No different?
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
And why should we want to? As a physicist I am more annoyed by the people who insist on having correct physics in movies (or books) than the incorrect physics itself.
Hello? It's a movie! Not a documentary or part of a curriculum. At least to me hard sci-fi like R.L. Forward's Dragon's Egg is immensely boring.
The owls are not what they seem
Summary:
Yes, because cotton is stronger when wet.
No. His mouth would've run out of saliva or wouldn't be able to hold the water if he decided to drink.
No. It's too far, not to mention wind resistance and the angle.
No. Aluminium would take a whole lot of stronger acid.
Possible, although the cranker needs quite a lot of water.
Impossible. The hose wouldn't be able to hold the acceleration due to gravity
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
A ship made of Unobtainium (granted, they joke about this in the film), drills to the center of the Earth so it can let off nuclear explosions to restart the outer core spinning, thus restoring the Earth's magnetosphere.
On the way to the outer core, the ship encounters a geode the size of a small moon and giant diamonds, all while ignoring the fact that the upper mantle in effectively solid, and at the pressures and temperature encountered at the depth they're at, a nuclear explosion isn't going to do squat.
The mere fact they send a manned probe down is laughable.
Now I know it's just a movie, and having some geology knowledge, I must admit it was a laugh a minute, but it took it's self far too seriously to be given credit, never mind a character being employed to "hack the internet" and stop all documents with certain keywords moving about.
If it were done in the style of Starship troopers, I'm sure I would have enjoyed it, but as is, bleh.
Looks can be deceiving. Or CAN they?
One of my fondest memories of a final exam is a physics problem dealing with the acceleration needed for Superman to catch a baby that fell off of a skyscraper, and what acceleration was needed to slow to 0 velocity as they both reached the ground.
Be who you are and say what you feel, because the people who mind don't matter, and the people who matter don't mind.
So should the military teach combat by showing Rambo movies? Perhaps convicts can learn to be nice people by watching episodes of Family Matters. I'm thinking about opening a Salvage Yard, I'm gonna do some market research by watching Sanford and Son.
Blockquoth the BBC site:
Very impressive, since it the building is only 32 or 33 floors high (indicated several times in the movie). It also implies 105 m of fire hose, which is itself ludicrous. However, the fall is "really" only a few floors (say, 4, if you take the building to be 34 floors and he ends up back on floor 30), his final speed would have been 16 m/s rather than the 46 m/s the BBC got.
Does it matter? Well, it turns out that the BBC thinks "head shear" would have killed McClane, because his "severity index" was 3018, way above the fatal number (about 1000). But their speed is high by a factor of about 3, and the speed appears in that equation raised to the 2.5 power. So his "real" idex would be about 16 times lower, or 190.
But interestingly, this is only about half of the index required to knock you out. So actually, using numbers more consistent with the film, you find that not only does McClane survive the fall, he is not knocked out!
All of the stress arguments also depend on this bad speed, but since they concluded he'd survive the overly-strong stop, he's OK at the lower speed too.
BTW, I don't know how elastic firehose is, but they neglected its retarding effect as he fell, too.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Execpt that shockwaves and sounds do travel through space.
An explosion simply means that matter moves very fast outwards from the centre of the explosion. In an atmosphere, the moving particles hit the particles of the atmosphere and transfer their kinetic energy to them, and those particles hit other particles, and so forth. When they hit you, they transfers their kinetic energy into your outer particles, which transfer it onward, making the shockwave propagate through you, throwing you backwards (if you are light/unsecured) and causing damage as if you were hit by a blunt object (which you were - air). You sense the changing pressure as sound.
On the other hand, in space, nothing stops the original particles from the explosion. They travel through space until they hit something. When they do, they transfer their kinetic energy into its outher layer (which will transfer it onward and so on, causing an internal compression/decompression wave), throwing it backwards and causing damage as if it was hit by a blunt object (which it was - a blunt wall of particles). If it has audio sensors, it will sense the pressure change (compression/decompression) as sound.
Of course, a TIE Fighter should still glide silently...
It should also be noted that, according to the theory of realitivy, when mass is accelerated, a gravity wave is created. So if you blow up a planet, it will cause a shockwave in the fabric of spacetime itself. However, due to the weakness of gravity as a force, such shockwaves are usually below notice.
I recall reading that if Alpha Centauri would go supernova, the resulting shockwave would tear off Earth's atmosphere. But hey, that could make the ultimate sci-fi movie - Alpha Centauri is going to supernova, and the only way to stop it is freezing a group of old astronauts and sending them there in a shuttle to dig into it's core to deliver a bunch of nuclear bombs to restart fusion reaction there, all the while a black monolith ruling an evil space empire sends its space orc minions flying in space fighters that make a "swhooshing" sound as they fly by and turn on a dime, because the monolith needs the energy from an exploding star to recharge its power systems to continue its 5 million year mission to explore new worlds and civilizations and to conquer them, but fortunately the princess of the aliens (which just happen to look completely human) in the planet the space shuttle falls into after being shot down by the fighters has hots for the hero and helps him develop his magical powers, so he can help his friends when the Monolith kidnaps them and reveals it's actually his father and that the aliens really look like giant spiders and are just using their awesome telepathic abilities to make an illusion of appearing humanlike, and were actually the ones who lured the astronauts there to breed with them because they, like many spiders, eat their males after coupling, and have none left anymore, and how he, the monolith, has send his armadas to attack and conquer Earth, but fortunately the hero manages to resolve the problem with his spider lover with an clever use of a gag, causing the spiders to alliy themselves with Earth and drive off the invaders, which is fortunate because the monolith has destroyed their home planet in a fit of rage, bt fortunately the power of love between the hero and the spider allows them to defeat it, marking the beginning a new age of enlightenment and really kinky interspecies relationships in Earth (literally in, because everone forgot about the supernova, but fortunately Earth turned out to be hollow, with a new, primordial world inside, and primordial savages turned out to be no match for the enlightened army of surface humans armed with flame throwers and assault rifles, not to mention missiles and nukes, helped by giant kinky cannibalistic telepathic space spider chicks).
Oscar gala, here I come :) !
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
In UK universities in 2003, there were around 35,000 applications made to study Sports Science BSc.
Yes, but those 35,000 applicants all aspire to being self-employed personal trainers earning 40 pounds/hour. Compare that to the career opportunities for science graduates and can you blame them?
The trailer for The Day After Tomorrow looks great, and certainly has a strong message about global warming in the film (just don't try to visit their website over a modem!) Starts May 28th.
Can't get to the site to rtfa, but I had a similar course from the same University (different prof) over 25 years ago. It was called "The Physics of Science Fiction" and the premise was that we would read various works of popular science fiction (and watch some movies) and consider how the "laws of physics" were either the same or different in their universes.
Wasn't a bad class really. We read Fred Hoyle, Larry Niven, Hal Clement, and some others that I don't remember. It gave a decent introduction to basic phsyics and was fairly popular on campus amongst the nonscience majors. (I took it because the prof was a friend of mine and said I would enjoy it.)
Courses like this are certainly not going to replace traditional lab physics for science majors, but they can do a fine job of making science more interesting to some students who normally don't enjoy it.
It sounds like you're making a value judgement about what a good scientist is. Is a psychologist, who strictly adheres to scientific method a good scientist? What about economists?
As to the point, I submit that it helps people think SCIENTIFICALLY, i.e. using scientific method. That alone justifies the course in my book.
UCF Class of 2001
and hopefully 2005 as well.
One of the things that impressed me about the TV show "Firefly" was that when something in space blew up it didn't go "boom".
I've found that my posts don't format quite right w/o a sig.